What is the big deal about a newly refurbished historic opera house reopening in India – a country that is not known for its love of the art form?
It is a fair question but, since its official opening on October 20, the Royal Opera House in Mumbai has become a source of pride for the city.
In a city full of Victorian architectural splendours, the venue manages to hold its own. Built in the early 20th-century under the British Raj, it is in the grand Baroque style, with a pedimented facade, marble statuary, Corinthian columns, chandeliers and opulent interiors.
At the glittering ceremony to mark the reopening, stunned guests, including Bollywood stars Amitabh Bachchan and Aamir Khan, had the chance to see how painstakingly all these features had been restored by respected conservation architect Abha Narain Lambah over an eight-year project.
The day after the reopening, the voice of Patricia Rozario – a Mumbai-born British soprano – resonated through the house, as she performed a variety of arias to mark the occasion.
It was a career highlight for the singer. After seeing it closed for 23 years, she was now a first-time visitor.
“For me, ‘opera’ was just the name of a bus stop that I used to see as I travelled into town by bus,” she says.
The Royal Opera House shut down and fell into disrepair because it lost its relevance to the city’s social and cultural life. In the old days, it was used strictly for staging operas to entertain the city’s elite.
As interest in the art form waned over the years, the shows were unable to generate enough income for the venue’s upkeep. As cinema grew in popularity, the building was adapted to screen movies, and it hosted many a gala premiere. For a while, this kept the venue going, but eventually it again started to struggle, as single-theatre cinemas began to give way to multiplexes.
In 1993, the Gondals, the royal family who owned the building, closed its doors indefinitely.
By the time they hired Lambah in 2009 to begin the restoration process, it was a wreck. She recalls stepping inside and being shocked to see the structural weaknesses caused by Mumbai’s monsoons and humid climate.
“There were peepul [sacred fig] trees growing out of the walls,” she says.
“The girders were so corroded they were like lace, the jack arches had to be supported, there were distressed areas and leaning balconies.”
One of her difficulties was reimagining how the Royal Opera House, a listed Grade I heritage building, had looked in its heyday.
In its less illustrious later days, the Baroque interiors were replaced by hideously bright pinks and greens, in an attempt at an Art Deco look.
“We were acutely aware that the restoration had to be based on archival research and hard facts, not on conjectural reconstruction,” says Lambah. “So we relied on archival documents, old photographs and historic texts that described the interiors when the building opened in 1916.”
Another challenge was restoring the building and the interior, while at the same time installing state-of-the-art acoustics, stage craft, lighting, air conditioning, and all the other amenities needed for a 21st-century performance space.
Lambah recalls one big surprise during the restoration – the discovery of the remains of three-tier side balconies that had been lost at some point.
“When we removed the side partitions, we were delighted to find the old structural system of these flanking balconies and that was a complete surprise – these balconies are now restored to their old glory,” she says.
Though Rozario performed opera music for the grand opening, this was essentially an honourable gesture to the building’s origins.
The restored Royal Opera House will reportedly aim to operate as a general performance space – for concerts, plays, fashion shows, talks, poetry recitals, book launches and dance.
But there will be a big difference this time: it will not be a place only for the elite, according to Asad Lalljee, chief executive of Avid Learning, who will curate the cultural events.
“The Gondal family and all of us want this beautiful space to be accessible to everyone, to the ordinary person,” he says. “We’re going to fling open the doors to all kinds of performers, including young talent, so that we create vibrant, living space within this beautiful building.”
Judging by the reactions so far, the venue seems set to become a lively epicentre of the city’s arts and culture scene.
As Lambah points out, throughout the world, opera houses are either supported by the government or through large trusts. Mumbai’s opera house is unique in that it is privately owned, with no outside support.
She hopes this will change, with government support coming in time. “This can be very challenging for a privately-owned heritage property and is a case in point for India to have a policy on supporting privately owned heritage buildings.”
artslife@thenational.ae